


Auroras

by thecountessolivia



Category: Arctic (2018), Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Conversations, Hurt/Comfort, Other, Will at the start of Season 3, season 3 canon divergence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-17
Updated: 2018-10-17
Packaged: 2019-08-02 12:23:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,886
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16305158
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thecountessolivia/pseuds/thecountessolivia
Summary: Overgård and Will Graham. A conversation.To avoid "Arctic" spoilers, the story summary is included at the start of the fic.





	Auroras

**Author's Note:**

> Takes place immediately after the events of "Arctic". 
> 
> Overgård is rescued and brought to a research station, awaiting transfer to a medical facility. There, he's looked after by an American man with a secret.

_"The heart is a stone and this is a stone that we throw."_  
\- Beach House, 10 Mile Stereo

  
\---  
  
Voices spill from the roar of the rotor blades. He smells fuel, or maybe the smouldering remnants of his coat. He sees faces, reaching hands. Med kits, blankets.

They swarm over the woman.

They swarm over him, too. They reassure him, the way he reassured her, but their words soon become a sonic blur. The last thing he sees are her eyes: soft and hazy and fixed on him as they lift her up. They take her away from him. It hurts more than anything else.

Then he blacks out.

\---

  
Warmth is the first thing he registers when he comes to. It's more shocking than the ten types of pain competing for his attention. Alien, this warmth, like an invasive fever. He'd gone so long without.

His vision swims, but he tries his best to take stock of the shapes that form his new world: the bed he's in, the IV in his arm, the clean white room. A window faces the bed and looks out on the snow.

Two people file into the room. A sturdy older man who quickly closes the blind over the window, as if the sight of the white world outside might be too much. A small blonde woman checks his IV. A third man, dark-haired, sits in the chair in the corner and watches Overgård like the angel of death.

Overgård strains up from his pillow and stares at each of them in turn, as if they might all vanish the next time he blinks, along with the too-warm bed and the clean white room.

"The girl?" he asks, but can't hear himself. Screaming into the frozen air must have done a number on his vocal cords.

"Alive," the woman says. "Airlifted to Nuuk. They'll be back for you in a few days' time."

That's good enough. The words give him permission to sleep again. He fights the feeling for a bit, as he always did out on the ice. As he drifts, he thinks he can hear the dark-haired man arguing quietly about something with his two companions.

\---

Black. A jagged well of light staring down at him from above. He's back in the cave.

An avalanche of snow and rocks comes tumbling down on him in slow motion. He's smothered, but he fights: pushes and digs and pulls until his fingers snap and crumble into bloody stumps and still he can't get out, can't get out, can't get to her, and she's up there, all alone, so alone in that endless white void...

Did he scream? He's awake again. He jerks his hands up to his face. He counts.

“They’re all there,” a voice says. “All ten of them. But you lost another toe.”

The dark-haired man is getting up from his chair. Was he sitting there all along?

"Blinds open?" the man asks.

Overgård is still shaking. He slides his hands back under the warm white sheets. He nods.

"Nightmares?"

"How'd you—" Overgård coughs and it hurts more than it should. At least his voice still works.

"I've had my share," the man says. He's got an American accent.

Light floods the room, grey and thin. The day is starting or ending — Overgård can't tell. He misses the reassurance of his wrist watch. What's happened to it?

"Where am I?" he asks instead.

"Research station. Closest settlement is Atangmik." The man draws back Overgård's blankets to checks on his leg. He wears a strange expression: haunted and stormy.

"You're a doctor?"

"No. Just temp staff," the man says, and begins to change the dressing. His hands are quick and gentle. Not a doctor, but he's tended to wounds before. "Graham," the man adds after a moment. "Will."

"Hello, Graham-Will."

The man called Will looks up and gives Overgård a slightly pained expression, as if he were attempting to a smile. "What hurts the most?" he asks.

 _Everything_ , Overgård wants to answer, but points to his leg.

"You got lucky. No infection. The flight that dropped you here didn't have any IV pain relief to spare. They left us some heavy duty oral stuff, but you need to eat something first. Okay?"

With that, Will Graham replaces the blankets and leaves the room.

Alone again. Through the wall, Overgård can hear muted voices and laughter, muffled television or radio, clanging of kitchen pots. Human life, proceeding as it should. All of it alien, like the warmth that's making his skin itch. He'd gone so long without.

He checks his hands again. All there: all ten of them. He wonders if somewhere hundreds of miles away, the woman is awake too, counting her fingers. He wonders if she still has her picture.

Will returns with a steaming tray. He uses his foot to quietly shut the door.

"Where are your colleagues?" Overgård asks.

"I told them to fuck off for a while."

"Why?"

"Too nosey. Wanted to hear all about your adventures. The last thing a trauma survivor wants to do is regale strangers with the harrowing details of their ordeal. You need time and space.”

Trauma. Somehow he never thought of it that way, out there in the empty void of white, under the northern lights... But then again, looks like the nightmares have already started. He never dreamt much since the crash.

"Thank you," he says.

"Can you sit up?"

Overgård can, just about. Will unfolds the tray over him and pulls up a stool.

Overgård laughs when he sees the contents of the soup bowl: noodles, morsels of fish. His laugh sounds appalling: raw and cracked. Then he grabs the spoon, hauls it up desperately, and never gets it past his chin. It goes spilling. His shoulders are concrete. His arms are jelly, shaking with pain, useless from days of pulling the sledge.

He’s about to try again when Will intercepts the spoon.

"Slow down— here, let me. No, wait— you're bleeding."

Overgård tastes copper. He licks his lips: split, wet with blood, rough like crumpled foil.

"It's fine, I don't need—"

"Sure you do. Hang on."

It's shocking to be touched again, shocking like being warm. He almost flinches when Will wipes at his mouth and dabs it with careful fingers coated in ointment from the bedside kit. Overgård watches this stormy-faced man closely, tries to catch the eyes of the first human he's spoken with for months. But Will doesn't seem to do eye contact.

"Better?"

"Yes. Thank you."

Will refuses to surrender the spoon. He fills it up, blows, and brings it to Overgård's lips.

Overgård nearly chokes on a groan of pleasure and relief at the taste, and tries not to strain for more. Will sets a steady, patient pace. He cools down every mouthful. He wipes spills from Overgård's beard. Being spoon-fed is novel and strangely humiliating, but hunger overwhelms Overgård's shame. He finds he's just as starved for conversation.

He nods to the soup. "That's trout. It's what I lived on.”

Something in Will's stormy face softens. "You must be sick of them then. How did they bite out there?"

"Terribly. You fish?"

"Used to. No— still do." Will frowns. He's tearing off bits of bread, soaking them in broth. "Not out here, though."

"I'd show you the size of biggest one I caught, but—" Overgård makes a show of trying to lift his useless arms.

That gets him a smile, a real one this time. Another first for him in months. Will's smile is a nice one: a bit cheeky, as the English might say.

“Was it as big as this bed is wide?” Will says, eyes still smiling.

“Oh, bigger.”

Will loads up another choice spoonful of noodles, fish and broth. "You saved that woman's life,” he says quietly after a moment.

"Anyone would have tried to do the same."  
  
"Not everyone. I know— knew someone. He wouldn't have saved her. He'd have let her die. Or worse."

"Or worse?"

"How hungry did you get out there, Overgård?" Will says through his teeth. "When the trout didn't bite?"

Overgård stares at Will for a moment. When he understands, he stares at the window, now a square of almost perfect white, full to the brim with a bright Arctic day. The thought — that thought — never even crossed his mind.

"He sounds like a bad person," he says. "This man you know."

"He looks like you," Will blurts out quickly.

"Ah."

Then they are quiet. Has Overgård forgotten how humans are put together, how their psyches operate? Have those months of complete solitude changed him so much? No. He's certain there is something odd about this American with stormy eyes, temping in a research station at the end of the world.

“Why are you out here, Will?”

It takes Will some minutes to answer. He fills the moments by scraping the bottom of the bowl for the last few morsel of fish and feeding them to Overgård.

“I read that they were looking for a downed plane. And I saw your picture.”

“And you thought I was that man. The bad man you know."

"Yeah. Or at least some relation."

"You're looking for him."

"Yeah."

"I'm not him."

"I know you're not him," Will snaps. The spoon clangs against the bottom of the bowl. "You save people. He doesn't." Will is shredding the last of the bread into crumbs. "It was stupid, desperate."

"We all need something to be desperate about."

"You were desperate to save her."

"And you're desperate to find him."

"I'm not— I don't know what I'll do when I find him."

"Just as I don't know what to do now that she's alive and I've been rescued."

Another long silence. Overgård takes a piece of crumbled bread from the tray. This time, he manages to feed himself.

"What was it like, being alone out there?" Will asks at last.

There's no point in hiding the truth. "It hurt," Overgård says. "The loneliness was like hunger. But then there were these moments... I'd wake up at night and look out of the plane's windows. The aurora would be filling the whole damn sky. Greens and reds and purples. So many colours. So many stars. You've never seen so many stars. I didn't care then if they never found me."

Will gives him another smile, small and sad this time. "Doesn't sound too bad."

"But then she came."

"And you didn't have a choice," Will says.

"No choice." The woman crash-landed in his life and Overgård was tethered to his purpose.

Will is quiet for a moment, staring down at the emptied tray.

"I'll get you those drugs," he says.

Will returns and Overgård takes the pills. They look at each other for a long time. Overgård thinks he know why.

"Will you sleep again now?" Will asks.

"I'll try."

"No nightmares this time, okay?"

"No nightmares. Promise."

"Will you dream about her?"

Overgård smiles. It's a nice thought. "Maybe. Maybe I'll dream about the northern lights."

"Either one is fine."

The opiates waste no time getting to work, spilling their magic through his veins.

"Graham-Will," Overgård mutters as he begins to drift. "Am I gonna see you tomorrow?"

Will takes Overgård's hand and squeezes.

Overgård never hears the answer.


End file.
